Martijn My VPN decided to die on me. Not even hitting 1 Mbps. This is definitely not what I'm paying them for.
Mark Dain Never gave a VPN too much thought, what do you use it for? Netflix or just general internet traffic?
Martijn General internet. It hides my public IP as well as encrypts my traffic when I'm on public networks: around school or coffee shops.
Mark Dain Encryption I can understand (I'd still recommend HTTPS Everywhere incase your VPN provider keeps logs/collects data) but if you use it all the time you only end up with the IP of your VPN being associated with you. Does that give you more anonymity?
Martijn It does, you share the IP with others so anyone trying to track you ends up tracking a big number of users. Without your actual IP they cannot guesstimate your location or contact your ISP either.
Mark Dain They can't contact your ISP but what about your VPN provider?
Martijn A VPN provider that claims not to keep logs and secretly does can be sued for breach of contract. You have to trust them not wanting to get sued. (Also: go with older and well-established VPNs.) In comparison to ISPs who - in several countries - are legally bound to keep logs. And even if your VPN provider fails you are still left with the same protection by your ISP as you would have had without VPN, no loss there.
Mark Dain I never thought of it that way. I may look into getting a VPN then. I was thinking of hosting stuff at my house (e.g. CalDAV) so I'd VPN back to my house to use the server on the LAN, it's kinda the other way around but I suppose VPN'ing out of the network has benefits too.
Fred Richards Are there certain ones you like or have been looking at?
Mark Dain I haven't had time honestly, who would you reccomend?
Fred Richards There are a lot of good ones out there. What OS do you run on your desktop? Honestly, I was considering running my own service on resources I have. There's also freebie ones out there, like vpngate, but they're more like a research experiment and the endpoints can come and go. I like any ones based on OpenVPN because then you get cross-platform functionality, use it on your phone, tablet, desktop, and every OS.
Mark Dain OS X, iOS and Linux. Ideally I'd get OpenVPN for my computers and IPSec for my iPhone (I think that's the strongest that's supported).
9y, 4w 1 reply
Fred Richards That's definitely a good policy. I have an entire lab set up, including the OpenVPN based vpn. Right now I use it solely for remote access to the lab if I'm ever out of my home office. It's based off of pritunl, I like the interface and the fact that it stores everything in a mongodb database. There are a small handful things I don't like about it. Ultimately any OpenVPN client would work. See, you have me thinking about how to implement ipsec into the whole mix. :)
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